Mental illness seems to be a growing problem in societies all around the world. Until the mid-twentieth century a large proportion of people who were classified as mentally ill and admitted to mental hospitals were actually suffering from physical ailments like epilepsy and brain tumors. Today researchers are learning about the biological origins of many mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, autism and alcoholism. The mental disorders that cause severe social problems are the most extreme forms of mental illness, like the ones that threaten the social order such as a sociopath who becomes a serial killer.

Thank God for Mental Illness

Barnes in later life when battling mental illness

Rethink Mental Illness

The number of individual in society with these disorders is small, but they constitute a serious social problem because they are so violent and irrational.

A more widespread social problem is severely mental ill individuals who cannot care for themselves without special attention. These individuals include people who are mentally ill and chemically addicted, and are likely to be indigent and homeless. Mental ill individuals experience a variety of symptoms such as unimaginable fear, uncontrollable hallucinations, panic, crushing sadness, wild elation, and mood swings. For society as a whole, their illness presents a range of social problems: stress in family life, heavy demands on health-care institutions, moral and ethical problems, the cost of treatment to society, etc (Kornblum, 2001). It is said that the mentally ill...

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... disorder, and be placed in a mental institution. However with all that the young adults of the late sixties were having to live through: complete uncertainty, distrust in the government, no clear future… it was quite possible that the new science of ...

... lead a healthy life, but not in the typical sense. I define health as not simply the absence of illness, but as a state of being in which I function to my highest mental, physical, social, and emotional levels. This study, while it hasn't ...

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